2016-17 NBA Season

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Farewell Friends
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Re: 2016-17 NBA Season

Post by Farewell Friends »

I can't remember a playoff with more intrigue than the one coming up. Celts, Raps and Wiz all have a chance to make life hell for the Cavs, and the Warriors could get their kryptonite (Grizzlies) and Rockets in the second round.

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Transmogrified Tiger
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Re: 2016-17 NBA Season

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I am not much of an NBA fan so take this with a grain of salt, but I think people pushing an increase in parity for the playoffs are overweighting regular season results that are nigh irrelevant. The Cavs aren't going to be seriously challenged in the East(even if they don't have Love, IMO), and Warriors/Spurs is pretty much predestined in the West. I give the field maybe 5% chance of making the Finals unless someone like Leonard, LeBron, Irving, or one of GS's big 3 get hurt. Stars win in playoff series, and no one in the East has the horsepower to do more than annoy the Cavs to a Game 6, and no one in the West can touch those top 2.

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Re: 2016-17 NBA Season

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I don't think it's far-fetched to see the Grizzlies and Rockets taking the Warriors to six or seven games, likewise any of the other top teams in the East with the Cavs. Of course the Cavs and Warriors are going to be series favorites, but (to me) that doesn't take away from the intrigue. The winner of a series doesn't have to be in question to make it exciting.

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Re: 2016-17 NBA Season

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Transmogrified Tiger wrote:I am not much of an NBA fan so take this with a grain of salt...The Cavs aren't going to be seriously challenged in the East(even if they don't have Love, IMO)
Hold on there, kemosabe.

The Celtics have spent the last 6 weeks gaining on the Cavs, most of it without Avery Bradley who is probably either their 2nd or 3rd best player, depending on how you value D and how you feel about Al Horford. They're largely the Warriors if the Warriors focused more on D than they do on shooting--they're a three-and-D team that puts more emphasis on the D but can still really spread the floor. Between Bradley and Marcus Smart there is virtually always a player on the floor who is an elite defender who can be put on the opposing team's best player. It's not an accident that they're 2.5 back of Cleveland, who they beat last week in probably one of the 5 best regular season NBA games of the last decade.

The Wiz have the best starting five in the NBA now that Durant is down. Compare LU between them and the Cavs:
PG Kyrie - Wall (edge: Wall by a close margin)
SG JR Smith - Beal (edge: Beal by a big margin)
SF Lebron - Porter (edge: Lebron by a big margin)
PF Love - Morris (edge: Love by a small margin with the caveats that 1. Love is fragile, and 2. Love can disappear for extended periods when healthy)
C Thompson - Gortat (edge: Gortat by a big margin)

The benches? Edge: WAS by a far amount. For CLE: Korver is one-note, they have a couple retreads on 10-day contracts, guys like Derrick Williams who is on like his 6th team in 5 years. Frye isn't very good, neither is Shumpert, Deron Williams lost his job this year to a guy on a 10-day. For WAS: Bogdanovic was a good add, gives them a very good shooter, Oubre is coming along, Mahinmi has been getting more run and is playing well, Brandon Jennings was a nice pickup. Their bench has improved a lot since the deadline and they're playing well. They've won 7 out of 10 and that 10 includes a 5-game road trip that took them to 5 Western Conference cities in 7 days. There's a reason they too have been catching up with the Cavs and are only 3 games back. These are not two unmatched teams, or teams in which one is light years ahead of the other. CLE has the best player on the planet, but CLE's fourth best player would not start for the Wiz.

The Dubs have been awful without KD. They had to work their tails off to beat Philly by two points last night. They are in very bad shape right now. IF SA passes them and the Dubs draw Memphis in the first round (and this is very possible) and KD is not back they could be out in the first round. Memphis plays a very special type of basketball and they are tailor-made to stop a team like GS.

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themiddle54
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Re: 2016-17 NBA Season

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And re the Dubs chances in the West and their current form? As someone who hates on fans who hate on Durant because he supposedly made the Dubs just invincible?

They got rid of Bogut (elite passing big and a good rim defender, 5.4 Win Shares last year), Barnes (good wing shooter, 4.9 WS last year), and Mo Speights (instant bench offense and 1.8 WS last year) and Festus Ezili (awesome glass cleaner and shot blocker off the bench, 2.7 WS last year), and Brandon Rush (3P threat and solid rebounder, 2.0 WS last year) so they could sign KD. They filled in with Zaza at C (fine but no Bogut) and some misc pieces that were not as good as last year's misc pieces. They were roughly 10% worse entering this year than they were last year because they depleted their depth to fit in another star.

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Re: 2016-17 NBA Season

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themiddle54 wrote:
Transmogrified Tiger wrote:I am not much of an NBA fan so take this with a grain of salt...The Cavs aren't going to be seriously challenged in the East(even if they don't have Love, IMO)
Hold on there, kemosabe.

The Celtics...
No, he's right. Honestly, the Celtics and Wiz need to worry about getting past Miami if they make it to the 6 or 7 seed. If they get hot outside for a prolonged stretch, like they have multiple times this year, they could beat both of those teams.

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Re: 2016-17 NBA Season

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Hornets: #ReekForMalik

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Re: 2016-17 NBA Season

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themiddle54 wrote:
Transmogrified Tiger wrote:I am not much of an NBA fan so take this with a grain of salt...The Cavs aren't going to be seriously challenged in the East(even if they don't have Love, IMO)
Hold on there, kemosabe.

The Celtics have spent the last 6 weeks gaining on the Cavs, most of it without Avery Bradley who is probably either their 2nd or 3rd best player, depending on how you value D and how you feel about Al Horford. They're largely the Warriors if the Warriors focused more on D than they do on shooting--they're a three-and-D team that puts more emphasis on the D but can still really spread the floor.
Let me simplify my argument a bit further.

- I care about 1% what happens in the regular season, the Celtics gaining on the Cavs tells me quite literally nothing about what's going to happen in a playoff series
- The Cavs will have the 2 best players/shotmakers on the floor in any Eastern Conference playoff series, and that gives them an almost insurmountable head start before getting into the bottom of the starting lineup or bench depth. This applies similarly to Golden State/the West too.

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Re: 2016-17 NBA Season

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Transmogrified Tiger wrote:- The Cavs will have the 2 best players/shotmakers on the floor in any Eastern Conference playoff series, and that gives them an almost insurmountable head start before getting into the bottom of the starting lineup or bench depth. This applies similarly to Golden State/the West too.
I don't agree. They have the best player since Jordan, and the most physically imposing player since Kareem. Lebron is always the best player on the floor, regardless of what numbers some ball-hogging chucker puts up in a single season and regardless how crazy someone shoots from the outside. Sure, he's the alpha dog in any series.

But in a Cavs-Celtics series Thomas is the 2nd best player on the floor. Shotmaker? He's 2nd in the NBA in scoring. He has a .624 True Shooting Percentage. The only elite players with a better TS% this year are Durant and Jokic and Jokic lives in the paint. Thomas is a stud scorer. He's been a better player/shotmaker than Kyrie all year, and he's 6th in the NBA in PER (Kyrie is 2st, Lebron is 8th.) What's even more impressive is that he's probably shorter than every member of this board and he goes to the paint, uses the rim against bigger defenders, and scores in the paint fearlessly.

And Wall is a better distributor and rebounder than Kyrie. Scoring is close, Kyrie has better handles, but all-around Wall is a better player and would be the 2nd best player on the floor in a Wiz-Cavs series.

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Re: 2016-17 NBA Season

Post by thrill »

themiddle54 wrote:But in a Cavs-Celtics series Thomas is the 2nd best player on the floor.
themiddle54 wrote:all-around Wall is a better player and would be the 2nd best player on the floor in a Wiz-Cavs series.
thrill wrote:Image

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